Goats were the first livestock species to be domesticated by humans and continue to function as a key source of protein and economic value for many communities. In the sixteenth century, Spanish colonists brought goats to the Americas. Unlike other nations, the United States did not maintain a significant market...
Microfinance boomed as a development trend in the early 2000s as it was appealing to varying political perspectives and was also seen as a major innovation in poverty reduction policy. Starting with the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh in 1976, microfinance spread to Latin America in the 1980s, and later to...
Tuberculosis (TB) is a pressing global health issue with approximately one third of the world’s population infected by this bacterium. As one of the most dangerous infectious diseases, it has killed approximately 1.7 million people of all ages around the world per year (World Health Organization, 2016). Currently, several drugs...
Due to the colloquial and adaptive nature of jazz, not much is known about the process of how a jazz piece is composed. Often, pieces that were not intended for jazz performance are adopted by jazz musicians; those who compose jazz are almost always performers, as they focus their explanation...
Social behavior such as play, affiliation, and some vocalizations of captive animals can be indicators of good welfare. Cheetahs (Acinonyx jubatus) at the Cheetah Conservation Fund (CCF) near Otjiwarongo, Namibia are often housed in social groups with various backgrounds. Observations of social and active behaviors were recorded for a group...
The smartphone is changing the way individuals interact with one another in society. Given the instant accessibility and multitude of socially iconic features, the contemporary handheld device grants users an unprecedented level of connectedness. However, despite the new breadth of access, perhaps the depth of the resulting social networks is...
Purpose: The purpose of this study is to determine the feasibility for an infant with Down syndrome to use a modified ride-on car that encourages the physical skills of pulling from sit-to-stand and standing with assistance. Method: An 8 month old boy, Child B, was video recorded during the 11...
Human use of fossil fuels has caused a dramatic shift in the earth’s environment, with global temperatures rising and ecosystem health declining. The need for the human species to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels is apparent. This will be achieved by replacing conventional energy resources with sustainable alternatives, and...
As of February 2012, approximately 46% of American adults own a smartphone. The graphics quality of these devices gets better each year. However, they still have many more limitations in graphics processing and storage space than desktop computers. This means that applications on these devices should focus on optimizing their...
Electricity is at the center of attention as today many essential systems (water, gas, communications, and the internet for example) and infrastructures depend on its continuity for their smooth functioning. On the other hand, electricity power networks have developed and became large, and highly complex technical systems, geographically extended, requiring...
A Tablespoon or Two is a food blog featuring recipes, featured folks, featured ingredients, an about me section, and my food history. The target audience is Pacific Northwest young chefs who like to cook affordable and fresh comfort food. The pages of the blog feature posts such as a trip...
The purpose of this project is to modify the Transportation Options Health Impact Estimator (TO Estimator) tool to quantify the health impacts of outdoor recreation in Oregon. The TO Estimator tool uses the Integrated Transportation and Health Impact Model (ITHIM) to quantitatively estimate the hypothetical health impacts of transportation mode...
Barley and cereal yellow dwarf viruses (B/CYDV) are a suite of aphid-vectored pathogens that affect diverse host communities, including economically important crops. Coinfection of a single host by multiple strains of B/CYDV can result in elevated virulence, incidence, and transmission rates. We develop a model for a single host, two...
For the past 50 years, open-field burning has served as the main method to manage postharvest residue in grass seed fields within the Willamette Valley. Recently, farmers have implemented the full straw load and clean-nonthermal methods to remove straw after harvest. We hypothesized that these two alternative methods have caused...
Microalgae play an important role in the marine ecosystem. They are primary producers and form the base of the aquatic food web. The effects and changes that occur to microalgae are expected to have influences on the higher tropic levels. One major factor that influences growth of microalgae is the...
“An undeniably vast portion of American history is attributed to people of color. But these stories of discoveries and researches, resilience and liberation all seemed like missing pieces to the puzzle that is America.” (Vo-Nguyen). This speaks to the experience of how the stories, lives, and contributions of their communities...
An Achilles tendon injury can be devastating. Surgical methods to bring the muscle to full strength are not always available. Proposed is an ankle foot orthosis (AFO) that is entirely passive (does not add energy to the system) and uses the mechanical advantages provided by the walking gait of a...
Uveitis is a serious ophthalmological disorder characterized by intraocular infiltration of inflammatory cells. In most cases, uveitis is derived from the adaptive immune response. More specifically, CD4+ T lymphocytes play an important role in the pathogenesis of uveitis by recognizing uveitogenic antigen and orchestrating the immune response. While it is...
The objectives of this study were to determine the effects of acupuncture in dairy cows on caruncular matrix metalloproteinase type-2 (MMP2) tissue concentration and enzyme activity at 0, 2, and 4 hours after calving. Immediately after natural calving, a caruncle was obtained from the body of the uterus and flash...
HIV testing among high risk adolescents in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania is challenging due to poor access to test sites and AIDS-related social stigma. We adapted the OraQuick HIV Test, a self-implemented test (SIT), for low literacy youth with no internet access. To compensate for poor literacy, a picture instruction...
Osmotic stress is a common challenge faced by organisms in environments with variable salinity or aridity. Understanding the evolutionary mechanisms underlying adaptation to osmotic stress may have wide applications, including management of populations experiencing climate change, or engineering industrial organisms involved in processes such as fermentation. While Saccharomyces cerevisiae is...
An important goal of evolutionary biology is to identify the genetic mechanisms underlying phenotypes in organisms. Understanding adaptation to osmotic stress has many applications, since this stress affects almost all organisms on Earth. By studying the model organism Saccharomyces cerevisiae using experimental evolution, we can learn about genetic mechanisms driving...
Sulfide is an important species to measure in environmental water samples. The
spectrophotometric detection method for reduced sulfur species (sulfide) based on
generation of methylene blue was adapted to work in an apparatus utilizing microfluidic
PDMS mixing and observation cells with flow channels in the 100 μm range. The
benefits...
Global warming and on-going depletion of fossil fuels have stimulated research to develop renewable sources of energy. Current renewable energy use comprises only 10% of the energy consumed in the US and is focused mostly on generating electricity. The majority of the energy consumed by the US transportation sector is...
This project aimed to address the topic of children with disabilities through a well-researched children’s book. Dancing with my friend Maddie is a children’s book that focuses on a friendship between Claire, a typically developing first grader, and Maddie, a first grader with Down syndrome. Research has shown that addressing...
Camelids are known for frequent occurrence of general ill-thrift. In other species, neutrophil dysfunction has been identified as a cause of ill-thrift, and linked to chronic fungal and bacterial infections. However, no reference values exist for neutrophil function testing in camelids, which inhibits accurate evaluation of neutrophil deficiency in this...
In this work we propose a curve approximation method that operates in the curvature
domain. The curvature is represented using one of several different types of
basis functions (linear, quadratic, spline, sinusoidal, orthogonal polynomial), and the
curve's geometry is reconstructed from that curvature basis. Our hypothesis is that
different curvature...
This study applied a virtual rendition of the Morris water maze, which is commonly used for assessing spatial memory in rodents, to an examination of age-related differences in spatial learning among 42 younger (18-30 years) and older (>60 years) male human participants. Virtual Morris water maze performance was measured by...
Not many people in Russia have been able to successfully create an opposition movement under the presidency of Vladimir Putin. Opposition is already hard in any country, but things are especially difficult in Russia. Putin has made protest regulations, stifled the independent media, and excessively utilized selective rule by law....
Tomato flowers (Solanum lycopersicum) were used as a model system to investigate flower color modification by alteration of the carotenoid biosynthetic pathway, due to their ease of transformation and short time from seed to flowering. Tomato flowers are naturally bright yellow, primarily due to the accumulation of violaxanthin. Violaxanthin is...
Five solvents were used to resolubilize the fungal pigments of Chlorociboria aeruginosa and Scytalidium cuboideum, two common fungi used in the spalting of wood pieces. These solvents were tested as a replacement for dichloromethane in the pigment application process, via analysis of their ability to increase internal color coverage inside...
The aging process is a biological phenomenon in mammals that heavily contributes to the onset of chronic diseases. While there are many theories that attempt to explain the biological onset of aging, one emerging theory involves chronic inflammation. Chronic inflammation has been previously linked to several age-related diseases and is...
This honors undergraduate thesis examines the process of simulating power system state estimation, the use of the alternating direction method of multipliers in the problem of distributed power system state estimation, and provides a rudimentary asynchronous implementation of the above for a linearized DC power system. The asynchronous implementation is...
Drones are being used increasingly in the transportation sector for roadside applications such as surveying, structural inspection, and traffic monitoring, which raises distraction concerns for drivers. This study examines the visual attention of a group of Oregon drivers to determine drones’ potential as distracting roadside elements. Eye tracking data was...
Today’s marketing researchers provide incredible depth of information which explains much consumption behavior in the marketplace. Research into consumer behavior, especially the family of research related to consumer culture theory, provides theory on which cultural phenomena motivate consumers to exhibit the patterns they do in the marketplace. This study uses...
This analysis seeks to (1) establish a typology of the post-medieval ceramics from the Malkin Tower site, (2) determine vessel forms and extrapolate site function, and (3) establish a tentative chronology for the site. Over four hundred post-medieval ceramic artifacts from the Malkin Tower site were analysed via descriptive and...
There is a considerable body of research on the effect of land use regulations on property values. However, less work has been done on the relationships surrounding tax revenue, small zoning changes, and the fiscal outlook of cities and counties. As a result, the purpose of this study is to...
Clear and unbiased question wording is important to obtaining consistent and accurate survey results. However, if the goal is not to obtain accurate results but instead to obtain a specific result, then altering question wording may be effective. To examine this possibility, we created a survey with 9 different versions...
Primate populations are declining in number, with an estimated “60% of primate species threatened with extinction from hunting and trapping” (Estrada et al., 2017). The largest threat to mammals in West and Central Africa is commercial hunting (Jost Robinson, Daspit, & Remis, 2011). Hunting these large mammals was once practiced...
This paper analyzes macroeconomic variables to determine their effect on the United States’ trade balance. Data on GDP, exchange rates, money supply and the trade balance are adjusted for inflations to get inflation-adjusted variables. This will lead to a regression with the goal of determining which factors explain the variability...
Rates of electronic cigarettes (or “e-cigarettes”) use among youth are so high that the Surgeon General declared them to be of “epidemic proportions” (A Report of the Surgeon General, 2012). If these rates go unchanged, e-cigarettes will likely be responsible for the creation of a new generation of combustible cigarette...
The yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, commonly used in winemaking, baking, and brewing, also serves as a host for the production of therapeutically valuable pharmaceuticals. Recently, the Bakalinsky laboratory constructed a recombinant yeast strain expressing two zebrafish (Danio rerio) genes in order to produce a UV-protective “sunscreen” compound called gadusol. An antioxidant...
The present study examined whether attention capture is driven by object saliency or contingent on top-down control setting using a go/no-go paradigm. Specifically, we investigated whether salient color singletons capture attention only when the target itself is also a singleton. We used a go/no-go task. Participants were told to search...
As part of the Botswana Global Learning Internship Program, a qualitative study was conducted regarding the current staffing conditions at the local village health clinic in Maunatlala, Botswana. This was a month-long project conducted over the summer of 2018. Students from Oregon State University lived in the village of Maunatlala...
Conservation of natural resources has become a new watchword of the scientific community. While many terrestrial ecosystems are well protected, marine ecosystems have only recently come to the forefront. Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) have been introduced as a means of protecting biodiversity, commercial stocks, and ecosystem services. There are many...
One of the most important components in the safety analysis of a nuclear reactor is its critical heat flux (CHF), as it can compromise the structural integrity of the clad and lead to the release of fission products into the primary coolant. Groeneveld et. al. has published a series of...
For wood beams, it is often assumed that the neutral axis is located at the centroid of the
beam. The neutral axis of isotropic, homogeneous materials is located at the centroid of the
material, but wood is neither isotropic nor homogeneous. The varying grain patterns and
knots located throughout wood...
In college transmission lines courses, students are expected to understand how different circuit configurations affect the signals on a transmission line. Having a way to visualize these signals can greatly improve their learning experience. This thesis details the development of an open source, interactive learning tool used to illustrate fundamental...
This study sought to understand the commonality of vaccine misconceptions among college students and where individuals feel they are obtaining their vaccine information. An IRB approved survey was used to collect 126 responses from Oregon State University students. Individuals, on average, correctly answered only 54.10% of the statements based on...
As pre-spawning mortality (PSM) in Chinook salmon in the Willamette River Valley becomes a more defined and examined area of study, more focus is granted to not only preserving the health of these fish, but also expanding knowledge concerning various pathogens that utilize the salmon as hosts and may be...